Nerdy prepared a beautiful post yesterday on the President’s day, but we held off because of events in Ferguson. So, here it is:

President Barack Obama and Vice President Joseph Biden applaud Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel for his years of service as he announces his resignation in the State Dining Room of the White House

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Stevie Wonder is greeted by President Barack Obama after receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom during a White House ceremony. The Presidential Medal of Freedom is the Nation’s highest civilian honor, presented to individuals who have made especially meritorious contributions to the security or national interests of the United States, to world peace, or to cultural or other significant public or private endeavors

Actress Marlo Thomas

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Golfer Charles Sifford

Ethel Kennedy

Journalist Tom Brokaw

Congressman John Dingell

Author Isabel Allende

Congressman Abner Mikva

Writer, curator, and activist Suzan Harjo

Robert Battle, the Artistic Director of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, recieves a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama on behalf of dancer Alvin Ailey

Actress Meryl Streep

Stevie Wonder smiles while showing off his Presidential Medal of Freedom

(President Obama (and Romney) will both participate in interviews to air during halftime of the Monday Night Football game between the Philadelphia Eagles and New Orleans Saints. The interviews with ESPN’s Chris Berman will be taped earlier Monday)

Steve Benen: The voting fiasco in Florida reached truly farcical levels yesterday, with Dan Smith, a political science professor at the University of Florida, explaining, “We’re looking at an election meltdown that is eerily similar to 2000, minus the hanging chads.”

…. The early-voting debacle in the Sunshine State is deliberate …. Florida Republicans designed the system to work this way.

…. I’ll just conclude with Rachel’s conclusion: “It is frankly an outrage that there are forces at work in our politics right now that not only make this type of situation possible, but that make it inevitable – who see problems like this and go out of their way to try to make it worse…. If you are one of those people being forced to stand in those long lines tonight or tomorrow or on Election Day, honestly, your country needs you to do it. Your country needs you to do it, not only because it’s your civic responsibility, but also because there are people trying to profit politically off of you not doing it.”

Michael Tomasky: Whatever the result tomorrow, voter suppression is one of the big stories of this campaign and its enduring scandal. The Republican Party before 2012 was a party that certainly did not want black and brown and poor Americans voting, so it’s long been officially racist and classist in this particular sense.

But up to now its measures were local and somewhat haphazard … now, though, in these past couple of years, the GOP strategy has been institutionalized …. For example, read here about what the secretary of state in Ohio is trying to do right now. It’s rather incredible.

…. Republicans: Are you really proud to be in a party that tries to rig the rules so that people who vote for the other side have a harder time voting? …. This is really a disgrace. The new Jim Crow, enforced not with burning crosses but with fountain pens, to paraphrase Woody Guthrie.

Charles Pierce: It appears that, while I was watching the president this afternoon, I missed another big moment in the ongoing mess that is the early voting being conducted here in the World’s Greatest Democracy, when all hell broke loose down in Miami-Dade county. The nonpartisan, but very conservative, mayor of Miami jumped in with both feet, with entirely predictable results….

Elections officials, overwhelmed with voters, locked the doors to their Doral headquarters and temporarily shut down the operation, angering nearly 200 voters standing in line outside — only to resume the proceedings an hour later….

…. Nearly all the voters stayed in line until a campaign worker reported her car had been towed from a private parking lot across the street. Scores of people ducked out of the line to check on their own cars. A second car had been towed.